COMMENTARY

Martin endured difficult road to K-State

One of the realities of being a sportswriter is that you more or less stop rooting for teams. You root for the story. You root for people. And this season, I will be rooting for Kansas State basketball coach Frank Martin.

You may recall that the day Kansas State hired Frank Martin, I was pretty appalled by the move. It seems to me, even now, that Kansas State panicked after former coach Bob Huggins bolted for West Virginia. The leadership there had tasted a little bit of basketball big time, and they liked it, and they weren’t about to give it up just because Huggins left too soon.

So within hours they hired Martin, a 41-year-old Kansas State assistant coach with a past (he had, a few years earlier, been fired as a high school coach in Miami after recruiting violations were discovered at the school) and no college head-coaching experience. They hired him to keep Bill Walker and Michael Beasley, probably the two most-touted recruits ever to sign with Kansas State. It all seemed a bit unseemly.

Thing is, my problem then was with Kansas State and the way they handled things. Well, that’s over now. Martin is the coach. And as Martin said Wednesday at Big 12 Media Day: “I’m not going to be judged by what happened that day. I’m going to be judged by what I do over the next 20 years.”

Here’s hoping he wins a lot of basketball games over those 20 years.

Here’s why: Frank Martin is an amazing story. He’s an inspiring guy. Here’s the kind of story that, honestly, you don’t get much in sports these days. Martin did not play college basketball. He did not have some well-known or well-connected coach act as his sponsor. He had nothing given to him, nothing at all. Heck, Martin was a high school junior varsity coach in Miami for seven years.

After that he became a very successful high school coach, then there were those violations (he has adamantly said he did nothing wrong, and many people involved agree with him). When he was trying to put his career back together after losing his high school coaching job, he ended up as an assistant at Northeastern, which is about as far away from basketball big time as you can get without a cruise ship. Martin says at his first game, there were 35 people in the stands.

“I could hear myself breathe,” he says.

He kept working. People like Frank Martin are the backbone of college basketball. They are the assistant coaches who work 18-hour days, go to a million high school games, sell their schools to parents, work with players on their fundamentals, soothe those players who had their feelings hurt, scream at those players who are wasting their talent, on and on. There’s no glamour in the job. There isn’t much money. Nobody knows their names.

Most of the Frank Martins never get their shot. They just keep working as assistant coaches until they get frustrated or lost. College basketball is political, just like any other business. Athletic directors are looking for big names, hot connections, a golden resume — it’s all a big star search. Well, Martin, like most hard-working coaches in the game, didn’t have any of that star quality.

But he flat worked harder than other people. Martin said he got that ethic from his mother, who had escaped from Cuba with her mother just after Fidel Castro came into power. Martin’s mother worked 12-hour days sewing in a factory in Miami. I’m also the son of a six-day-a-week factory worker. I know how that gets into your bloodstream.

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To reach Joe Posnanski, call 816-234-4361 or send e-mail to jposnanski@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.